Anyone who runs Windows is familiar with Task Manager, the program that shows you which applications and processes are running as well as displaying real-time statistics as to how much CPU and memory those programs are using, among other things. I knew that there were programs available (like our very own Sysinternals app Process Explorer) that let you see far more info than what Task Manager displayed, but I didn’t know that you could actually upgrade Task Manager itself.

However, it turns out that there is an add-on for Task Manager called Task Manager Extension which will add more features to this program. With Task Manager Extension installed, you’ll have new features like icons in the processes window, Windows processes will be greyed-out so you’ll know to leave them alone, and you’ll have tons more features from the right-click menu including options for displaying the system path and time the process has been running.

I think for casual users a simple tool like this would be much more friendly to use than Process Explorer, for example. Unfortunately, this program only works on XP and lower, and not on XP 64 or Vista. How disappointing! If anyone knows of any similar program for Vista users, please let me know.

Apart from the icons all that information is available already in Task Manager simply by ticking a few boxes in the Select Columns dialog, at least it is in Vista. If all that isnt enough then procexp at least still works on x64 (for those who want more that just the basics).

You can do things like find which process(es) has/have which files open, it shows you which processes are Windows processes, and you can have it highlight processes when their CPU usage goes above a certain point. It also let's you close exclusively opened files without ending the processes which has them open, so you can delete them.